[while washing the dishes]

turning toward the morning

Upcoming performance: If you will be in Portland, Maine, on March 11, maybe you’d like to come to WORKS AND DAYS, a collaboration between Nina MacLaughlin, Matthew Houston, and me. Sliding scale at the door.

When I was in high school, sometimes my dad would drive to work, and drop me at my high school on the way. This was after the years when he seemed to bike to work every day; he would have been in his 50s at this point. In my memory he seems so young that it’s startling to do the math. Anyway, he was a teacher and I was a student although he didn’t teach where I studied. My high school started at 7:00 and I caught the bus at 6:00 but on days when my dad drove I could leave a half hour later and get to school fifteen minutes before the first bell. This was Minneapolis in the 1990s; most of the days I can remember are winter days because in my childhood winter lasted from October through April. So my memory of those mornings, those early mornings, is dark blue and freezing, with the red of taillights and stoplights on Hiawatha Ave. blurring through melting ice into the lights of downtown Minneapolis.

He would always have the radio on, those mornings. The radio was a constant in my father’s life. Did he love any technology as much as the radio? Maybe the record player. Maybe the camera. But the radio he loved in the ordinary way you love the things that make your day-to-day life good. He liked to listen to the morning show on KSJN, 99.5 FM, Minneapolis-St. Paul (I can still hear the announcers saying the call sign). It was on from 6 a.m. until 9 a.m. and played a mixture of folk, “world music”, indie music, oldies, and just weird stuff—Metamora’s “Little Potato” and Monty Python’s “Galaxy Song” were in regular rotation. Frequently the radio would play that song up there, Gordon Bok’s song “Turning Toward the Morning”. I associate this song with the dark, the cold, the red lights, the ice, the feeling of the heat blowing weakly out of the vents in the janky minivan heading down the road toward the center of the city, through the sleeping neighborhoods.

In How To Do Nothing, Jenny Odell writes about how listening to the radio connects us to other people—people we may never meet or even see—who are also, at that very moment, listening to the radio. She points out how different this experience of shared listening is to the experience of ‘content consumption’ tailored to individual tastes (her example is Spotify). Culture is something that we all share, and taste is the map of points that light up when we enter the field. I’ve been thinking about the smoothing of aesthetic experience that advertising-driven social media produces lately, not least as I’ve been reading two collections of essays—one by Lydia Davis and one by Robert Hass—and getting a sense of how I might want to spend my reading time this summer. Reading these books has been like being in class with teachers whose depth of reading inspires me to want the same. I haven’t read any of what Davis or Hass have. I don’t know half of their references. But the result isn’t estrangement; it’s desire. I want to commit to the work of reading and thinking and writing, of going into regions I don’t yet know how to encounter. They are making me interested in learning, and making me remember that I’m interested in learning things I have no idea about. I don’t have to know I like it to be able to like it in the future.

This feeling reminds me of those mornings in the car with my dad, listening to a radio show that was eclectic but without a sense of its own quirkiness; eclectic because the radio hosts really did have a deep and broad awareness of what was out there, and they were curious and knew how to seek out what they didn’t yet know how to listen to. There was a network of actual relationships there that were alive and meaningful. It’s made me think about how vital it is to be willing to trust others’ expertise—real, live others: the bookshop worker, the person who sells records, the librarian, the radio host, the teacher, the friend who listens to a lot of music. How vital those relationships are to make and to maintain, because that’s how you find out how to care about what you don’t yet know how to like: going back to the same person over and over, learning to understand them, them learning to understand you. Time with art and books and music and the people who care about them. Taste, like genius, is shared, not individual; not really. And it accretes day by day, like layers of nacre in a shell. Until one day, you realize, there it is: the array of things that have formed you, some of which will also have formed the people around you, one facet at a time.

This is the 53rd essay on Bewilderment. Thank you for reading this year! The next one will be the last before I take a break from the weekly writing schedule.

If you have enjoyed this year of essays, please drop the cost of a subscription into the donation slot at UNRWA.